


Lucky Stars

by kalliel



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Episode: s08e11 LARP and the Real Girl, Fandom, Gen, Meta, Metafiction, Minor Character(s), Moondor, POV Minor Character, REALLY minor character fic, Season/Series 08, being in a fandom
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-06
Updated: 2014-05-06
Packaged: 2018-04-08 05:53:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,244
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4293246
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kalliel/pseuds/kalliel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What does Moondoor mean to Tim the Magician? Well, he and Dean Winchester have one thing in common: They will love with more than what they'll ever get back.</p><p>8x11 "LARP and the Real Girl" missing scene.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lucky Stars

Moondoor gave him his beard. He'd never been into costumes before, hadn't even read _The Lord of the Rings_ , never mind the other series with greater currency around Moondoor (something about expanding generic references, formulating a canon separate from extant monoliths. Tim can't tell the difference); but he'd seen the flyer in the rec center and seemed less racially intimidating than the tai chi group. He's a lapsed Episcopalian from whitebread eastern Oregon--what can he say. So when he moves back East, he joins the costume crew, and he learns about speciality shops that aren't codenames for fetish stores, and bears the insults to his obvious lack of homeopathic know-how, and falls in with the medicine-makers in the Kingdom of the Moon.

He's not allowed to call himself a medicine man, because the term has accrued a certain racialized cultural colonialism that Moondoor strives against (the Shadow Orcs being the exception--a countercultural, subversive allusion, according to the official playbook). So he's just Tim. Some call him Tim.

This combination of name and station--the Magician, Tim--made him a hit with the Anglophiles right off the bat, and Tim counts his lucky stars that he finds a home so easily. It's a world of cultural reference and self-actualized passion and these kinds of things still happen here. (Tim's in politics. After a year and a half of courtship he asked his girlfriend if she wanted to come to Thanksgiving at his parents' house, meet his family, and she said, "Aren't we taking things a little fast?" The real world ain't kidding about the long game, Tim whispers, this mantra bestowed upon him by the bartender he came to know and love after the girl fell through and he was back to solitude while nursing his hope for promotion or even a transfer so he could start over again. He takes a breath. Finally.)

In three weeks, Tim has watched and re-watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail with almost every member of his cadre. 

He had never watched a movie more than once before.

He now owns a bunny--white, red-eyed, with large, pointy teeth. He's thinking of buying a separate wardrobe for his Moondoor robes and effects. Maybe he could get _the_ wardrobe; he'd loved C.S. Lewis as a kid. Tim has wished he knew about things like Moondoor sooner, but he realizes he did; of course he did. He'd just assumed it was all kid stuff. The funny thing is, he has a hard time imagining kids liking any of this stuff now. They couldn't possibly have the dexterity and patience for chainmailing, the mathematical know-how for tabletop conversions and calculations. They couldn't possibly know all these references--Tim, again, counts his lucky stars that he was alive and reasonably sentient (he was 11) for _Star Trek_ , for _Twin Peaks_. Demographically Moondoor is comprised of what the Nielsen inductees crisply refer to as the 18-49 grouping. His age gives him an edge over all of them.

It stings a little that the Queen of Moons has only been playing for a year by the time she's crowned; he's easily been here for three. But she's good, he'll give her that. Her name outside is Carrie Heinlein, she's on his Pub Quiz team, and she knows everything. "Motorola" is their inside joke together. It's a long story.

It is Tim's dream to toast to Carrie, Queen of Moons, one day, surrounded by his soldiers in arms, remembered and loved and liked by his teammates. They are, barring his mother, his only e-mails that aren't for work. The only messages on his answering machine. But he's never been texted for after-raid drinks before, and he's not invited to the kickbacks. He's not sure he would go if he were invited; it's not really his thing. Maybe they all know that. But he can't help but think, it could be his thing, if he were expected to be there. He could get drunk. He could be the silly drunk that people tell stories about later. He could feel safe, and unselfconscious, and looked after by these people.

They are his best friends in the world. They've changed his life. They have. They've given him his beard. (That's what he'd say. His toast. "You've given me my beard, my queen." It's part of a character vernacular he's been working very hard to cultivate. Once someone told him, 'That's such a Tim thing to say' and it's the best thing that anyone has ever said to him.)

But he still feels like an outsider sometimes. Everyone knows him, everyone likes him, but no one loves him. He's not the person surrounded by rapturous, intimate, passionate friendship like, it seems, everyone else is.

These are his best friends in the world, and they all have better friends.

He wishes it were as easy as a name, a beard, a robe, a rabbit.

But if this is as far as he will ever get, he thinks, then he will thank his lucky stars.

Moondoor means the world to him, even if he doesn't mean the world do it.

"I give you my beard," he mouths, when the Queen walks by. She's escorting a new recruit, the way she does. The way that made her Queen in the first place. She's so good. He tries his best to mind his own business, to not be creepy. He's awkward, he can't help it; but he tries to.

The new recruit is named Dean. He has a brother, Sam. Carrie the Queen of Moons listens, laughs, shares back. As she does. She's a friend to him--they share something, though Tim suspects it is not Moondoor. Classmates, maybe. Not co-workers; they're still playing catch-up, haven't seen each other in a while. Old friends from a different life. 

Tim has none, and wouldn't know. Nor, he suspects, does Dean. Because the way Dean looks at her, it's like he's surprised she's there, and it's not because of the crown, or the bodice. He doesn't fully trust that she is there. He's not used to seeing the same people twice. Tim's familiar with the feeling; there's a lot of changeover in his line of work and he agrees, it's weird. But--and he's not sure if it's something about Dean, or something about Carrie--Dean looks at her like he doesn't trust that she's alive at all. 

But she is, of course she is, she doesn't quite understand how amazing that is (nor does Tim, but there's a lot of things he doesn't understand, he's still learning to understand). She's a small miracle to Dean, and to her, Dean is a friend--a good friend.

And that, Tim understands. He counts his lucky stars, he understands. Because he and Dean, whoever Dean is, have one thing in common. They have less. They may not _be_ less, but sometimes they feel it. Tim feels it. Dean, maybe. He couldn't say. Tim's been trying lately, at the behest of a girl whose mother actually does to tai chi, not to be so judgmental. But he's pretty sure that he and Dean have one thing in common: They will love with more than what they'll ever get back.

Tim swallows, and pulls at his beard.

Tim adjusts his robe, and dons his hat, and Tim goes to fetch his bean bags.

* * *

Dear Fandom, ♥ you all. 

P.S., That guy on the left is Tim:


End file.
